UESPWiki talk:Protection Policy

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Archived discusssions about the Protection Policy

Extra protection

The main page is fully-protected to prevent vandalism. However, it includes pages like the news, which are unprotected. This means that the main page can be indirectly vandalized. I suggest semi-protection at all pages that the main page includes. Thoughts? --Rigas Papadopoulos • Talk • Deeds • 12:20, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

That makes sense. The trouble is, of course, remembering to protect each news article as it comes up, but as I recall, there's a way in MW to automatically grant the same level of protection to transcluded pages as is given to the parent page. GK played with it some time ago, so she might remember more than I do (especially since I don't really have a way to play with it unless I do a whole bunch of things to my test wiki). I'll direct her to this discussion. – Robin Hood↝talk 20:52, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

There's the "Protect pages included in this page (cascading protection)" option, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to use that. There have been several cases where people have had good reason to add material to existing news stories - the obvious recent example was UESPWiki:News/Is This the Next Novel?. Semi-protection might be worth considering, but then it's yet another job for the admin in what's already a pretty longwinded procedure.

The point I would make is that I can never remember a case where a news story has been vandalised. It's not obvious how to get at the stories, which is bad in some ways, but good in this case. rpeh •T•C•E• 21:25, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

As I recall, there's a third option (or maybe it was just a clever use of cascading protection) where you can basically create a page which in turn lists other pages to protect. That would allow us to semi-protect news stories fairly easily while maintaining full protection on the main page and not granting unexpected protections on things like templates. I believe all auto-confirmed editors would then have the ability to add news stories to the list of semi-protected pages if an Admin forgets, so we don't have to trouble them even further for every news story. – Robin Hood↝talk 21:54, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

It's probably a clever use of cascading protection. I think that if UESPWiki:News was semi-protected with cascading protection, and then put onlyinclude tags around the current news section... that might work. I think. rpeh •T•C•E• 22:16, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Couldn't we just semi-protect UESPWiki:News with cascading protection? That way the Main Page would stay fully protected, and every news article transcluded onto the news page (which in-turn means every news article transcluded onto the main page) would be semi-protected. --GK^talk2me 22:27, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Looks like we got there in the end :)

Why not try it then we can see how it works? rpeh •T•C•E• 22:37, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

(←) Kay, that doesn't work... cascading protection only works with full-protection; I don't really like the idea of the news articles being fully protected, either, so I guess this is a case of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." --GK^talk2me 23:01, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

More info: here. rpeh •T•C•E• 23:10, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

I suggest to semi-protect all the pages that are included at the main page manually. --Rigas Papadopoulos • Talk • Deeds • 11:45, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

New Use for Section Protection

If you'll take a look at this version of UESPWiki:News, I think I figured out how to transclude News onto the Main Page (so we only have to update the one page) without having to worry about people being able to edit stuff that's on the Main Page. The only problem is that it's not an approved use of protect tags. Does anyone have any problems with using the tags in this way? --GK^talk2me 13:03, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

I think it's a good idea. We shouldn't start using section protection on a regular basis for this kind of thing, because it's not an integral part of MediaWiki and might not be 100% reliable, but it's probably fine for that one page. It's worth trying out in any case. rpeh •T•C•E• 20:44, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

Alright, we'll consider this "ok" for this use only, no changes to be made to policy. Let's see if it worked... --GK^talk2me 20:59, 27 April 2011 (UTC)